Erik ten Hag’s Manchester United reign is already in crisis while Leicester may have to make do with what they’ve gotPersuading Daniel Levy to open his wallet is surely one of the greatest achievements of Antonio Conte’s career, but for as long as he refrains from using his new players, it barely matters. Though it does make some kind of sense to retain the men who earned a Champions League spot, making the point that places are earned by performances, not purchase prices, there is an Yves Bissouma-shaped hole in Tottenham’s midfield that on another day would’ve cost them the game. It’s true that Pierre-Emile Højbjerg scored a crucial goal, but it’s equally true that they were lucky to be...
Attempted career reboots for the footballing pariah have amounted to little with his immense talent unfulfilledExplaining the thinking behind his move to Australia in an interview last December, Jack Rodwell professed to have been conflicted before agreeing to sign for Western Sydney Wanderers, the A-League side he had just joined following a two-week spell in quarantine at what was once an insalubrious miners’ camp outside Darwin. While the midfielder felt he had more to offer as a player in England or elsewhere in the European big leagues, the impression was conveyed that a lack of alternative options meant relocating to Australia had to be considered.The decision to move to Sydney was made easier by the fact that his wife is...
Manchester City’s new star announced his arrival in a way that carried with it a dreamy sense of deja vuWith 64 minutes gone at a chokingly hot London Stadium Erling Haaland killed this Premier League game with a goal that carried its own dreamy sense of deja vu. It was a goal that already felt like a repeat, like something emerging out of traces in the air, a bend in the space-time continuum. How many times has this happened, that rangy, slanted figure, veering in from the right, the sense of a familiar reel of film playing out?Haaland’s second goal of this game, the second of his Premier League debut, felt like confirmation of the old truism. Knowing what your...
Debuting superstar striker is upstaged by a teammate and an opponent during defeat to Liverpool in the Community ShieldOK. This might take a while. Just talk among yourselves. For Erling Haaland this was a debut not just to forget, but to shred, incinerate and bury at the bottom of the garden. Haaland looked limb-weary by the end of this clammy high-summer Community Shield final, a curtain-raiser for a stage that has scarcely been cleared of tables and men in brown coats.For much of the second half at the King Power Stadium Haaland skulked and mooched in the centre circle. With seconds left he produced a wonderfully wholehearted miss, clumping his shot off the top of the bar with all the...
There is jeopardy in fresh forward lines and that is where the initial fascination of this season’s Premier League title race liesCan a team be too perfect? Could it be that if you have technically brilliant players in every position who have fully assimilated into a slickly intelligent system, the result is not a remorseless winning machine but a slightly cold entity so fixated on order that when disruption comes it is unable to cope?In the aftermath of last season’s the Champions League exit against Real Madrid, Pep Guardiola dismissed suggestions that his team could not handle adversity, that crisis could send his sophisticated mechanisms haywire. But it is at the very least intriguing that City’s two highest-profile recent signings,...